


Shelter

by Liana Mir (scribblemyname)



Category: Original Work
Genre: First Contact (sort of), Friendship, Gen, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-13
Updated: 2018-10-13
Packaged: 2019-08-01 13:39:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16285613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scribblemyname/pseuds/Liana%20Mir
Summary: They told a lot of old stories out past the boneyards where humans buried their refuse and their dead. They told stories of the olden days and knights in gleaming ships and dragons riding between the stars, their flames licking the earth and warming our places: city and hearth, home and dark machine heart. They told a lot of stories and Shania listened with the open ears of a child, drinking them in with her dark eyes, and storing them in the secret spaces of her memory.





	Shelter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [silveradept](https://archiveofourown.org/users/silveradept/gifts).



They told a lot of old stories out past the boneyards where humans buried their refuse and their dead. They told stories of the olden days and knights in gleaming ships and dragons riding between the stars, their flames licking the earth and warming our places: city and hearth, home and dark machine heart. They told a lot of stories and Shania listened with the open ears of a child, drinking them in with her dark eyes, and storing them in the secret spaces of her memory.

So when the cities cast her out and rejected her, when she had to scramble into the boneyards to save herself from scavengers and dangerous men—some in uniform, some in no better uniform than that of the lawless ruffian—she didn't stop there. She kept going. There was shelter beyond the boneyards and civilization beyond the wilderness. It just wasn't human.

* * *

Gleaming Scales was one of the younger dragons, much less inclined to run off a small stray human shivering in the entrance to his caverns, at least if that human was curled up in a kit-like ball, damp from weather, sleepy, and outside the door as though that human was civilized.

He very carefully evaluated this unexpected guest and even more carefully warmed her with a small puff of breath.

Her eyes blinked open, she stared at him, then she yawned just like the cat one of his neighbors kept for companionship. Then she made a warm, humming sound in her throat that sounded like bones singing, closed her eyes, and went to sleep.

She was such a tiny thing, likely not full grown, and Gleaming decided right then to take care of the little stray human. He made her a soft bed of the silkiest, gleamingest soft things from his hoard and tucked her in by the fire.

* * *

No one told him before that the nature of humans. They were as unbiddable as cats and clearly as intelligent. She showed affection, the little human he called Bones Sing, curling up against his scales, sometimes cleaning them or scratching an itch too hard for him to reach. She also made herself a nook to cook food in and asked him for things out of his smaller treasure rooms with a gesture or a questioning head-tilt. It fascinated him to watch her put his things to use.

Humans were fascinating. She may have been impossible to order around beyond a few simple things she seemed to agree to rather than just obey, but she wasn't an overly difficult human or too demanding, and he couldn't fathom why the wild colonies, their shining lights in the distance, hadn't wanted her.

He decided to take a visit to the boneyards between and see if there were other stray house humans that needed a warm shelter for the winter.

* * *

Shania felt and heard herself actually growl when she first saw the bundle of stick and bones that her dragon brought back and set in front of her. He looked at the child that couldn't be older than four or five, then back to Shania, and made a low, whuffling sound. Shania was at least in her early teens before she'd been outcast.

Shania made herself small and reached out to the child, who sniffed, then whimpered.

She grimaced, then carefully brushed back the child's hair and was allowed it.

Shania didn't know by finding her shelter she was signing up to be the host to human guests by a philanthropic dragon, but as more guests came, she found so long as they respected everyone else, she couldn't begrudge them having their needs met. It wasn't so bad that the dragon looked at her and thought he wanted to help others.

It was mostly when the dragons friends of his own species came through that she made herself scarce. Which was how she found the library.

Books upon books upon books on neat shelves, all written in the Old Tongue. She knew a little, but not nearly enough and here was a treasure trove. Her dragon found her after his party and poked his nose in the great door. Shania very, very delicately turned a page and studied the intricate illustrations of dragon society.

She'd always heard stories of how much like people they were and heard those stories written off as myth. But those myths had always said you could find shelter in their dens if you came with respect and deference and without weapons.

Her dragon tilted his head curiously but let her read, and it didn't feel like a myth at all.

* * *

Many of the humans scattered whenever Gleaming Scales brought his hulking, fiery presence back into the home cavern. They weren't unfriendly, but the arrival of a dragon had never been a small thing. He supposed he shouldn't get too attached, considering how many he would give away to a good home, but as he settled down before the fire with a quick renewing breath upon the hearth, there was little Bones Sing, content to stay where she was with the object of her interest—one of Gleaming's books out of the library—and even snuggle warmly into the crook of Gleaming's arm, her customary humming song barely breaking.

Ever since the first time he'd seen her wondering wide eyes and oh so delicate turning of pages on one of the illustrated editions, he hadn't denied her the pleasure of looking.

Bones Sing was the first and, would Gleaming admit it, the best of all the stray humans he had gathered. He thought of her as his own.

From the beginning, she'd often bed down between his claws or in the crook of his arm or snug between his wings, clearly pleased at his natural heat in the winter cold. She bossed about the other humans when they got too rowdy and he despaired that he would have to try to discipline them. Humans were like the cats they'd once served, utterly unbiddable and inclined to do as they pleased. But they would listen to each other, apparently, and establish their own loose pecking order, and Gleaming couldn't help wanting to care for as many of them as he found, house humans cast out by the wild colonies and their fantastic cities built with as much industry as shown by prairie dogs. These didn't build cities, but they filled the caverns with warm chatter as they filled their bodies with the food he provided them and grew strong, instead of wasting away to die.

Gleaming Scales might be convinced to part with some members of his shelter. Other dragons deserved the joy of adopting their own human. But Bones Sing and her humming tunes whenever she was happy, her fierce glares whenever she was chiding a fellow human, and her contented form curled up against his scales when she slept—she was his favorite and so he'd decided not to let her go to anyone else.

He put his snout over her shoulder to see where she was at in the book, and one of her hands came up to rest against him, almost as if to hold him close, but she didn't look up, still humming to herself as she turned the page.

The dragon found himself startled. She hadn't brought one of the illustrated tomes with her to the fire, and she wasn't poring over pictures but _words._ But of course, it was silly to think humans could read. Maybe she found the script lovely?

But no, she took her time, finger sometimes tracing words across the page as she paused her tune and murmured to herself with her human tongue he could no more understand than she his dragon chirps and roars. Only when she had clearly read the entire page did she turn it again.

Gleaming Scales was thunderstruck. He thought back over the many weeks, the interactions with all the humans he'd taken in, young and old, large and small, and while it was one thing to consider them intelligent, it was another entirely to wonder if they might be _people._

He snorted, blowing an unfortunate number of live embers swirling into the air. He looked down at Bones Sing giving him one of her more skeptical looks. He dipped his head against hers in apology. She patted his scales affectionately and returned to poring over the volume.

Could Flames Excessively have been right?

* * *

Her dragon was being weird, Shania decided. He was eyeing her book choices suspiciously, testing her food preferences _again_ instead of just handing her cooked meat and letting her add it to the plants and vegetables he knew she picked from the field outside. Come spring, she was going to turn it into a proper garden. He knew she liked to sleep up between his wings where it was safe and warm but suddenly wanted to keep her in sight all the time. The only good thing was he'd stopped trying to bathe her in the big pool at the back, then bake her to get her dry again. Shania may have been young, but she was far too old to get washed up by someone else, even a dragon, and no human wanted to stand in his breath when it went past warm to flames.

She still hadn't solved the problem entirely of communicating, but even he knew what she looked like when she was angry, and that she'd go hide in the little kitchen nook they'd made where he was far too big to fit. She was hiding there now with another book in the Old Tongue and figuring out why humans never knew before that dragons were literate and likely just as sentient as they were.

Her dragon sat his nose down outside of the tiny (to him) doorway leading into the kitchen and whined at her. She hadn't scratched behind his wings in that one spot or sang him to sleep for more than a day now. Because she was avoiding him. He was being weird and watching her all the time like he used to do before they got to know each other.

But finally she sighed, pulled out a big square of paper she'd found in the library and wrote on it in the glyphs she was finally getting the hang of: LATER.

She went to the doorway and held it up, and he reared back, clearly surprised, then dropped his head back down again, in that slow way he had when he was deliberately trying not to startle her, and stared at the makeshift sign with one eye.

He made a little whuffling noise, picked himself up, then trotted away to his private cavern where he hadn't let the humans go. Something about all that gleaming gold back there, she figured. Dragons really were stingy little packrats in love with shiny things. Oh well.

She rolled her eyes and went back to her book.

* * *

"They're, they're... people!" Gleaming Scales gasped into the phone.

"Calm down," Flames Excessively answered, then sneezed. "Oh dear."

In the background, Gleaming could hear that low muttering sound he associated with less than happy humans.

"You were quite right they make splendid companions," Flames said and sat in the telltale creaking groaning sound of scales and tail beneath the dragon's not inconsiderable weight. "Just put out my bedspread. Now, what's this about people?"

"She's reading!" Gleaming exclaimed. "And writing!"

"Writing?" Flames' scales creaked again. "Well, that solves the problem of asking her how then."

And of course, Flames Excessively was right. But Gleaming wished he would acknowledge the gravity of upending all existing knowledge of humans. He muttered under his breath and went with a thick stack of plain paper to go make sense of this.

* * *

It took Shania about two sheets of her dragon's admittedly imperfect handwriting, her muttering about his need to return to finishing school for dragons to fix that, and comparing all the words she didn't understand to others in the books at hand in the library while her dragon stared at her, tail twitching back and forth in excitement.

There were myths among dragons that humans could think and reason, but apparently a wealth of received wisdom that humans were the former pets of cats, so surely all those stories about dragons and humans exploring the stars together were just that.

Shania laughed. She couldn't help it. Myths on both sides.

CATS?

It was delightful really. Maybe cats had their own language and myths as well.

She wrote again, MY NAME SHANIA.

The dragon plucked the paper from her hand with care in his claws, read, then wrote again in his atrocious handwriting, MINE GLEAMING SCALES. Then he said it in his absolutely impossible mouth.

"Shania." She didn't try to repeat his aloud, and he didn't try to repeat hers, but they had to refill the paper twice and the big bucket and little cup of tea they were drinking from as they passed their notes back and forth all night long.

* * *

There was shelter out there beyond the boneyards. Maybe it wasn't human. Maybe it had only been a myth. But this myth came to life.


End file.
